I recently read Lindsey Woo’s contribution to a series of writings about feminism and race on NPR’s CodeSwitch blog. In her piece, Woo discusses the frequent exclusion of Asian American women from conversations concerning race in the context of feminism and poses an important question, one I ask myself often: who is considered a woman of color?
I talk about race — a lot. I constantly initiate discussions with friends and colleagues, and find that even in our supposedly postracial world many still deem race to be an uncomfortable subject. Although I believe attempts to have a dialogue about race are important, another part of me does it for purely selfish reasons. These conversations help me to figure out my own relationship with race. They validate and invalidate my opinions, and give me a better understanding of where I fit as a light-skinned Latina.
My mother’s family is self-proclaimed “white trash” with roots in Tennessee. My father’s family is from the southwestern Mexican state of Michoacán. In the 1960s, my dad crossed the border into the United States, where he lived for twenty years as an undocumented immigrant before obtaining citizenship around the time I was born.
The legacies of two vastly different cultures live inside of me. One side of my family has former Ku Klux Klan members. The other has undocumented immigrants. Holidays meant a feast of fried ham, collard greens, and macaroni and cheese that was served alongside mole, tamales, and flan. Backyard barbecues featured Johnny Cash and Vicente Fernandez, Patsy Cline and Ritchie Valens. The blending of cultures is a beautiful thing, but it can also be confusing.
Being biracial means growing up with a keen understanding that your identity is not yours alone. It is something others feel entitled to foist upon you, including your friends and family. You carry the weight of racial tensions that not only exist in society at large, but also among those you love.
My mother’s family stopped talking to her because she had married a “wetback.” I didn’t know my maternal grandfather for the first eight years of my life because he refused to see me. According to my mom, when I was born he took to referring to me as a “mutt,” so she shielded me from his racist epithets and maintained a safe distance.
After members of my father’s family settled in the Los Angeles area from Mexico, they made many jokes at my expense. They told me I could never be a “real” Mexican because my mom was a gringa, but my dad insisted I proudly tell the world, “Soy Mexicana.” He now teaches the same to my biracial nieces.
It’s hard when neither side of your family embraces your blended ethnicity, and it set the stage for the identity crisis I’ve been having for twenty-eight years. As a Latina whose pallor matches my blonde-haired, blue-eyed mother, I don’t feel comfortable with the label “woman of color,” although it is often ascribed to me in the context of my work. In some ways my reticence is the product of not having the emotional bandwidth to defend my right to use the term when I come up against backlash, particularly from people of color.
I understand the discomfort some darker-skinned women feel when a light-skinned Latina identifies as a woman of color. After all, we are often the recipients of racial privilege that comes when we are (mis)perceived as being white. At the same time, my dark hair, ethnic features, and clearly Latina last name all place me squarely in the category of being raced. I try very hard to understand my place on the racial continuum, but knowing which side I’m supposed to be on isn’t always clear. And it is always shifting.
My identity has been shaped by my experiences as a Latina feminist. I resisted my father and brothers’ violent machismo, and also make sacrifices for my family that most white feminists don’t understand. Yet, fellow Latinas tend to have a deep appreciation for my family’s complicated love. Despite my skin color, identifying as a white woman was never an option for me.
A recent Census Bureau report shows that children in America are more racially diverse than they’ve ever been, and the fastest rate of growth is among children who are multiracial. Mixed-race people are rapidly becoming the new norm, but we still live in a world where we’re expected to choose and neatly conform to just one thing.
I often wonder if Chicana writer and feminist Cherríe Moraga, who was born just ten miles away from my hometown, underwent an exploration of her own identities that’s similar to the one I’m engaged in now. A woman of Mexican and Anglo ethnicity, Moraga is one of the foremost authorities on race and feminism in America. Her story gives me hope that I will one day reach the place where I no longer allow others to question my identity, the place where I determine for myself who I am and who I will be.
In The Fray contributing writer Joshunda Sanders recently spoke at TEDCity2.0, a conference focused on the challenges and innovations that cities across the world are experiencing today. Joshunda gave a moving talk about her mother’s struggle with mental illness (a story she also told for our blog), and the ways that cities can help, and hinder, the lives of the mentally ill — particularly those who are poor and homeless.
Joshunda’s mother resisted therapy and medication for her bipolar disorder, internalizing society’s view (especially prevalent within the African American community) that mental illness is a personal weakness. In her relationship with Joshunda, she veered between euphoria and depression, loving attention and violent abuse. The family ended up homeless because of her untreated condition, and Joshunda’s childhood was marked by evictions, stays in homeless shelters, and a perpetual hunger. Fortunately, their hometown of New York was generally benevolent in its benefits and its attitude toward the homeless — providing Joshunda with free breakfast in the summers when school was out (often her only meal of the day) and free transportation to and from shelters — even though it never really met their needs for food and housing in such an expensive city.
There are compelling reasons, Joshunda adds, that so many homeless individuals congregate in cities:
After my brother Jose got killed by a bus, my mother moved to the suburbs. So we lived in Chester for the first few years of my life. Chester is outside of Philadelphia. Most families there, in the suburbs — which are considered the heart of the American Dream — had cars, but because we couldn’t afford a car, we had to rely on public transportation. Often, without carfare to get into the core of the city, we would end up languishing in the isolation of the suburbs, and it was a little bit nightmarish. Sometimes the lights would be off, or the water would be off.
And one of the things people forget is the surprising truth about the visibility of the mentally ill in cities … there are real resources for them there. It’s not just the density and public transportation, but there is also this equal-opportunity solace from the cultural vibrancy of a city. So I urge you to think about that the next time you see someone who is mentally ill in the city. Before you think of them as a problem, consider how both they, and we, are transformed by our witness of them in the city. Think of me and my mom, just two fragile souls trying to make it through the city, with what little that we had.
Here is the video of Joshunda’s talk, which begins at the 49:09 mark:
Fifty years after the March on Washington, we are well versed in the visual cues of the civil rights era: grainy black-and-white photos and footage of peaceful protesters being accosted by angry mobs, beset by dogs and water cannons, and enveloped in plumes of tear gas. John Lewis, one of the giants of the civil rights movement, not only lived those scenes of protest and violence — a beating by Alabama state troopers fractured his skull — but he worked to make sure the struggle led to real political and cultural change by the era’s end.
Now Lewis and his collaborators offer a new visual take on the protests and the people behind them, in the graphic novel March, an illustrated (and unconventional) autobiography of the civil rights leader and longtime member of Congress. In a way, the book brings Lewis full circle: Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, a comic book published in 1956, helped inspire him to take up the nonviolent cause as a teenager.
There’s a long tradition of autobiographical comics, from Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor to Jonathan Ames’s The Alcoholic to Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (the basis of an Academy Award-nominated animated film). But Lewis is not just any other thoughtful voice of retrospection. One of the original Freedom Riders, he was a founding member and then chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which was instrumental in organizing some of the era’s most important sit-ins and other nonviolent protests against segregation — including the March on Washington. (The youngest speaker that day was Lewis, then twenty-three years old.) He also played a prominent role in another of the era’s iconic demonstrations, the Selma to Montgomery march, the source of the scars he still bears on his head. Lewis went on to a career in politics, representing Georgia’s fifth congressional district since the late eighties and now serving in the House Democratic leadership.
Lewis, we learn in March, was an unusual child. His parents were sharecroppers, and Lewis grew up on a farm in Alabama. As a boy, he raised chickens, not only giving them names but even devising a makeshift incubator because his family couldn’t afford the one in the Sears, Roebuck catalogue. His youth in the forties and fifties is captured in a series of panels: Lewis as a boy honing his sermonizing skills before a congregation of chickens (his first ambition was to become a preacher). Lewis as a young man first hearing King on the radio and becoming inspired to embrace nonviolence. As the narrative of Lewis’s life advances, March reminds us of the events transpiring in the background — from Rosa Parks’s civil disobedience to the killing of Emmett Till to the Brown v. Board of Education decision that struck down school segregation — all of which shaped Lewis’s worldview and led him and others down the path to protest.
The best dramatizations carry a sense of dread, or anticipation, even when you know the outcome. Like a train slowing a moment on the tracks and, by degrees, gaining momentum, March crackles with a sort of inevitability. We watch as Lewis and other young protestors in the Nashville Student Movement, a nonviolent direct-action group fighting against segregation, subject themselves – and each other – to a series of humiliating tests, preparing them for not only the harsh words, but also the physical retaliation they were likely to encounter. As Lewis points out, “For some, it was too much.” The hardest part to learn, he adds, was “how to find love for your attacker.”
Once the book settles into the sit-ins by Lewis and his fellow activists in downtown Nashville, you’re firmly locked in — you’re enlisted. And, here, really, is where Nate Powell’s art takes off.
When the sit-ins begin, the artwork becomes darker, the pages soaked with dark ink, the lines sketchier, shadowy, conveying the pain and fears of the nonviolent protestors. Powell’s style is somewhere in between the worlds of photorealism and animation, the images at times seeming to move on the page. It’s detailed enough that each face is distinctive from the other, with exquisitely rendered backgrounds undoubtedly reflecting Powell’s research on the downtown buildings of that era. His use of black and white is not just an artistic choice; it intensifies the action by making the reader slow down to see the details.
Part of a planned trilogy, March ends right after Nashville Mayor Ben West announces to the press and a group of protesters at city hall that he will support the desegregation of lunch counters. On May 10, 1960, six downtown stores, the book tells us, “served food to black customers for the first time in the city’s history.” We’re left with scenes of black Americans sitting at a lunch counter some three years before the historic March on Washington.
In August, Lewis spoke at the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington, sharing the podium with former presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton and President Barack Obama. The last surviving speaker of the original march, Lewis noted that the country still has “a great distance to go before we fulfill the dream of Martin Luther King Jr.” And yet, he said, change had come — as March itself suggests, in its introductory depiction of the inauguration of the country’s first black president. “Fifty years later we can ride anywhere we want to ride, we can stay where we want to stay,” Lewis said. “Those signs that said ‘white’ and ‘colored’ are gone. And you won’t see them anymore except in a museum, in a book, on a video.”
Sometimes I hear people saying nothing has changed, but for someone to grow up the way I grew up in the cotton fields of Alabama to now be serving in the United States Congress makes me want to tell them come and walk in my shoes. Come walk in the shoes of those who were attacked by police dogs, fire hoses and nightsticks, arrested and taken to jail.
March invites the reader to walk in the shoes of Lewis and the many other men and women who sat down, picketed, and marched for justice, without violence and with a great love for their attackers — and for their country.
Cornelius Fortune is a journalist whose work has appeared in theAdvocate,Citizen Brooklyn, theChicago Defender,Yahoo News, and other publications.
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In The Graphic Canon, comic artists reimagine dozens of classic works of literature, philosophy, and religion. The result, says creator Russ Kick, is like The Norton Anthology with pictures, drawn by an army of emerging artists who provide their personal — and sometimes unexpected — gloss on the world's great books.
The Graphic Canon (Vols. 1–3) By Russ Kick
Seven Stories Press. 1,600 pages.
More than a decade before Julian Assange and Edward Snowden became poster boys for information freedom, Russ Kick was a pioneer of using the Internet to heighten government accountability. If you’ve seen the video of then president George W. Bush reading “The Pet Goat” with a second-grade class in Sarasota, Florida, as terrorist attacks were underway on September 11, 2001, you can thank Kick for posting an uncut version of the footage on the web.
While he was an editor at the Disinformation Company, an online publisher of “the most shocking, unusual, and quirkiest news articles, podcasts, and videos,” Kick produced a number of anthologies that exposed untruths and challenged conventional wisdom. His most popular collections are Everything You Know Is Wrong and You Are Being Lied To. When a decade of media-based, information-freedom advocacy began to take its toll on his well-being, Kick knew it was time for him to switch gears.
While visiting a bookstore in Tucson, Arizona, Kick’s chance encounter with a graphic novel sparked a new direction. For the last three and a half years, he has been working with comic artists to reimagine classic works of literature, philosophy, and religion for a three-volume collection called The Graphic Canon. This summer, the final volume was released (the first and second volumes were released last year), and the trilogy will be available as a box set in October.
I spoke with Kick about how going in a new direction can be both daunting and gratifying, and why his current project adapting children’s stories is unsuitable for kids.
Part of what makes The Graphic Canon intriguing is that it does two things at once: elevates comic art while making classic literature more accessible to contemporary audiences. What led you to take on this ambitious project?
It was so depressing to produce these sociopolitical books, but I knew I wanted to keep writing and editing anthologies. So, I returned to some of my other lifelong interests: literature and art. One day I was in was in the graphic-novel section of a bookstore in Tucson and found a full-length, graphic adaptation of The Trial by Kafka. It struck me that there should be an anthology of graphic adaptations of classic works of literature. I thought it should be like The Norton Anthology I had dragged around in college. That was the moment the idea was born, and it seemed so obvious to me once I had it.
When did you become interested in graphic novels?
I’ve read comics all my life. Once I signed the contract with Seven Stories Press, I started approaching my favorite artists to ask them to be a part of this project. Then I branched out from there. One of the most fun parts of working on The Graphic Canon was discovering new talent. It is unbelievable how many talented illustrators and comic artists are out there. It was great to find people who are essentially unknown and give them the opportunity to be part of this collection.
Animal Farm as reimagined by Laura Plansker.
Reinterpreting iconic works of literature must be intimidating, and some of the chapters are closer renderings than others. Did you feel a responsibility to maintain these works’ original forms?
Because this is an art project, I started out by making the decision not to place limits on what the artist could do. I wanted the result to be a real collaboration between the original writer, their work, and the artist. By giving talented artists the greatest source material possible, I knew the result would be amazing.
A part of editing an anthology is learning to let go of control. It’s a process of chance and synchronicity. Some things you want at the start never materialize, and you end up with other things you’d never even considered that are just brilliant. It’s like looking into a kaleidoscope; what you see is always unpredictable yet interesting.
The Graphic Canon isn’t just works of literature. You also include philosophical writings from people like Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche and excerpts from religious texts. How did you decide what to include as “the canon?”
I started with a list of what I considered to be the most critical works of literature. These were stories that would leave a noticeable gap if they weren’t included, like The Iliad, The Odyssey, Dante’s Inferno, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and The Tale of Genji. But I also wanted to go beyond what was predictable and bring in unexpected things. That’s why I included the Incan play Apu Ollantay.
I also had a wish list of things I wanted to see adapted because I thought the story would work really well visually. Some of the artists I worked with told me they’d always wanted to adapt a certain work, but they never had a reason to do it. That’s what happened with Rebecca Dart and Paradise Lost, which are these stunning full-page illustrations and beautiful hand-lettering. It also happened with Rick Geary and the book of Revelation. Being a part of this project gave those artists the excuse they needed.
“Jabberwocky,” as reimagined by Eran Cantrell.
There’s a lot of diversity in the collection, stylistically and in how the artist approached the material. Some adaptations are straightforward and use the original text, while others are more abstract interpretations of a partial or whole work. What does this diversity bring to the collection as a whole?
People have told me they were pleasantly surprised with The Graphic Canon because it is so multilayered and features so many different artistic styles. A few times while I was editing, I was surprised when an artist brought something out of a story that I’d never noticed before. Even though some of these works are hundreds of years old, they still have really relevant things to say. The themes are so timeless and universal, and the artwork helps to get that across.
Every chapter begins with an introduction you penned that serves to contextualize the work and familiarize the reader with the comic artist. What did you learn by writing those introductions?
Too many amazing writers and poets died in total poverty, and only gained recognition for their work posthumously. In the chapter introductions, I talk about why the work is important and give some interesting facts about the writer or poet and the history of the work, to humanize it. A lot of times the backstory of a writer’s life and career is as interesting as the work itself. There are a lot of fascinating stories about pieces that were either completely ignored during a writer’s lifetime or torn to pieces by critics when it was published. I almost got tired of having to write that again and again. But it did teach me to never give up hope.
You mention the possibility of a fourth volume a couple of times in The Graphic Canon. Is that something you have in the works?
I am working on another anthology right now, but it won’t be a fourth volume. It will be graphic adaptations of children’s literature. Originally, the publisher and I thought this would be a book for children and adults, but now that the artwork has started coming in, I realize the book isn’t going to be appropriate for kids. It’s well known that a lot of what we consider to be children’s stories are really dark and violent, so you can imagine how the artwork might be disturbing. The artists and I won’t be watering these stories down like they do at Disney.
Best of In The Fray 2013. Raised in small-town Minnesota, college student Shelby Wolfe traveled to Ethiopia to shoot images for a documentary about poverty. There she met Rahel, a fourteen-year-old girl orphaned by AIDS.
By Scott Winter Photos by Shelby Wolfe
She was shy, and that’s what drew aspiring photojournalist Shelby Wolfe to her. Her name was Rahel Nunu. Fourteen years old and hidden beneath a green scarf and brown skirt, she lived in a compound in Addis Ababa for Ethiopian children turned into orphans by the AIDS pandemic. Living HIV positive in a country where the disease is so stigmatized had taught Rahel the value of discretion. It was May, the hottest month in the Horn of Africa, but she insisted on covering her arms with the scarf: her skin had erupted with rashes and sores, side effects of the powerful antiviral medications she took. Today she’d also skipped school, not wanting to take the risk of her condition being scrutinized by her classmates, who didn’t know her secret.
Inside the AHOPE compound for HIV/AIDS orphans in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
Shelby, a college freshman from small-town Minnesota, was visiting the compound as part of a photojournalism fellowship. She gravitated toward Rahel the moment she met her. The quietest girl in the orphanage, Rahel was an observer when alone or in groups, keeping her distance from the other children as they crowded around the compound’s TV to watch soccer matches and American music videos. Shelby was quiet herself, and she could relate to Rahel.
Sitting down next to Rahel, Shelby pulled out two sketchbooks and a pile of pencils she’d bought on the street. Shelby knew Rahel could draw. She had recently done well in a local art competition. With pencils or crayons or paint, she would draw the other girls—her sisters, as they called each other—or the beautiful women she saw on TV.
Shelby hoped the sketchbooks might get her to start talking about herself. Without speaking, Rahel drew a mother with the willowy look of a model.
Shelby drew an elephant. “Does my elephant need anything else?” Shelby asked.
Rahel took the sketchbook and added a baby elephant next to Shelby’s elephant, making it a mother.
Rahel Nunu in front of a painting she made on one of the orphanage’s walls.
Shelby was one of ten students from the University of Nebraska who were visiting Ethiopia on a three-week fellowship. For the past few years, donors had covered the overseas travel costs for a group of the university’s student photojournalists and videographers and a few of their professors (disclosure: I was one of the professors on Shelby’s trip). There were two conditions. First was that the students use the opportunity to capture Ethiopia’s stories of poverty and help bring about change there. Second was that they show their fellow Americans a new Ethiopia, a different kind of country than the one that Sally Struthers and company had brought to public attention in the 1980s with horrifying television images of famine victims.
Shelby had just twenty-one days to finish her assignment: shoot a batch of photos and videos that would impress her professors and wind up in a documentary and related blog the class was making about poverty in Ethiopia. Shelby needed a subject, and Rahel was the girl she chose. But Shelby didn’t have the reporting experience to get Rahel to open up to her. Shelby’s past work at her college newspaper was something altogether different from documenting a life-and-death issue like HIV/AIDS in Africa—and truth be told, Shelby had struggled to pass her reporting class that spring, right before she left for Ethiopia. She had never done anything like this before.
And then there was the heartbreak of the orphanage. She saw kids curled up on bunks, clutching their stomachs; the toxic medication they took seemed to make them as sick as the disease it was meant to fight. She saw babies, too, sleeping in rows of cribs, as nurses shuttled about the room caring for them. (“They’re our children,” one nurse told her.) For Shelby, the wild swings in emotion were difficult to take. One moment, she was watching kids playing ping-pong and twirling on a tire swing in front of walls painted with Dora the Explorer and Dr. Seuss characters—one of them drawn by Rahel. Another moment, Shelby found herself in the dark office of the orphanage’s assistant director, listening to Addis Bogale’s sobs as she described the most recent death of a child. “You don’t forget them,” Bogale said.
Shelby was overwhelmed by it all. She worried about whether she could handle three weeks in such grim surroundings. And yet she also knew that Rahel, and all her orphan brothers and sisters, didn’t get to leave.
Shelby slid the sketchbooks over to Rahel.
“You can keep those,” Shelby said.
Outside the compound, located near the Vatican Embassy in a residential area on the city’s west side.
Shelby Wolfe grew up in Minnesota. Her hometown, Owatonna, population 25,000, is the kind of heartland community that urges citizens on its Facebook page to make flag-themed fruit dips—strawberries, bananas, and blueberries—for the Fourth of July holiday. Her family lived an hour’s drive away from the Mall of America, one of the world’s largest shopping centers. As a kid, Shelby danced at an upscale studio. She had the same boyfriend for three years in high school. But she also loved Vietnamese food, especially a dish of grilled pork over vermicelli, and liked going to shows at First Avenue, a music venue where Prince used to play. Inspired by her globe-trotting older sister, she had hiked the Rocky Mountains and backpacked through Germany.
Shelby went off to college at the University of Nebraska. Away from home, Shelby pierced her nose. She started hanging out in coffeeshops. She became obsessed with her photojournalism class, to the point her other grades dropped and she had to do some explaining to her parents.
But that passion for photography also brought her to Ethiopia. The orphanage is funded by AHOPE for Children, a nonprofit based in Virginia. On her first day there, Shelby and her professor met with assistant director Bogale, who walked them through the part of the compound for younger children and then to a nearby group home. Bogale’s creation, the group home was a new project to integrate the children into the community so that AHOPE could get rid of the orphanage altogether. But that dream was a generation in the making.
Then Bogale brought them to another part of the compound, where Shelby met the teenage orphans. Sitting alone in one corner, watching the other girls watch music videos on the TV, was Rahel.
Rahel watches other children play basketball.
Addis Ababa is a modern city, only a century old. The capital of Ethiopia, it houses the headquarters of the African Union and is also known for being the home of beloved twentieth-century emperor Haile Selassie, known as Ras Tafari, who became the muse for the reggae movement half a world away.
Shelby saw little of the city. She spent each day at the compound. Nights, she met up with the other nine student photographers and three instructors, and together they critiqued the day’s photos. Those sessions were often as stressful for Shelby and her fellow students as the orphanage itself.
The group looked over the photos on Shelby’s laptop of Rahel sitting on her bed, watching TV, and showing off her artwork. It was clear to everyone that Shelby had some good shots, but she didn’t have a story.
Shelby was growing anxious. She didn’t have many days left. Her professors told her to keep shooting photos. Keep changing perspective. Keep asking questions. Shelby threw herself into the work, getting absorbed by the technical aspects of her craft. She kept telling herself that the story wasn’t about her. She should quit focusing on her own fears. What were they compared to Rahel’s? This girl wasn’t with her family—though she had one out there somewhere, unlike many of the girls in the compound. Not even the teachers at her school knew about her HIV. Being an orphan was enough of a stigma; she didn’t need the kids to know the rest.
Rahel and her AHOPE sisters walk to school, where only one teacher knows that the children are HIV positive.
One morning, Shelby followed Rahel to her school, where the staff put Shelby in front of all the kids and gave her a microphone to explain who she was and why she was there. The students lined up to meet her one by one. Then they lined up again to give her pink, orange, and white flowers. “Miss, I love you,” one girl said to her with a smile. The students giggled and begged Shelby to take their photos.
No, she could not fail at this.
One day at the orphanage, Shelby sat on the ground while Rahel rocked in a swing. Names of the world’s cities, countries, and landmarks were written in chalk on the walls of the compound. Rahel asked Shelby about the Coliseum in Rome. Shelby’s sister had been to India, and Rahel asked about how beautiful the country was. Rahel said she’d seen New York in a movie and wanted to see it for real.
Shelby asked her if she knew anyone who had visited other countries. Rahel said some of the other children had been adopted by families in the United States.
“Does that make you sad?” Shelby asked.
“Yes, but other children come.”
Rahel had been in the orphanage since she was five. Every child there, she told Shelby, was part of her family. “All I know is here,” she said.
Rahel and her friends laugh after making fun of some boys.
“I realized this is their life and these kids are making the best of it,” Shelby told me later. “I couldn’t imagine not having a family. But at the same time it was really touching that they are each other’s family.”
Her time with Rahel made Shelby think about how fortunate she was. Shelby is close to her older sister, who is always up for going with her to concerts and hikes and bonfires. She has a dad who is a periodontist and a mom who works at a pharmacy, and they lovingly take care of all her needs—from the Ford Focus she drives, to her out-of-state college tuition, to all the dance costumes in her closet.
Rahel had none of that. She could only rely on her “family” at the compound—assuming her sister-friends didn’t leave for a home of their own. When she prayed, Rahel said, she prayed for everyone at the orphanage. She prayed for the many mentally ill among the city’s street people.
“What do you pray for yourself?” Shelby asked.
Rahel said she’d ask God to help her help others. She’d ask to go to a better place, somewhere with a family that would make her their own. God can do anything, she said.
Rahel and her AHOPE sisters on the van taking them to field day at the Worldwide Orphans Complex.
Near the end of Shelby’s time in Ethiopia, Rahel and her classmates went on a trip. AHOPE and some of the other local orphanages had organized a soccer tournament, and the girls were set to play matches against the other orphanage teams—some with HIV and non-HIV kids, some with no HIV kids. As they rode to the soccer field in a red passenger van, the girls were noticeably giddy, happy to leave the compound for something other than school. In her field notes, Shelby described what happened next:
The girl sitting next to Rahel began vomiting into a narrow crevice between her seat and the doorway. The laughter and singing stopped, replaced with the sound of violent heaving.
Rahel placed her hand on her sister’s back, but her eyes were peeled forward, and her smile was gone. She handed the girl a tissue to wipe her mouth. The girl was embarrassed and turned to Rahel to say thank you. Rahel smiled slightly at her and withdrew her hand, collapsing it into her lap like it was too heavy for her to hold up on her own.
The van ride was silent for the rest of the way to the soccer fields, where they would face hundreds of other children who do not know they are HIV positive. It was as if they had forgotten, and then been reminded, of the burden they hold trying to hide their status from the world.
When they arrived at the sports complex, the girls put on their best game-faces and stepped out of the van one by one. They stuck together as they walked slowly toward the fields of children already playing.
The photos that day were strong. The van ride. The soccer match. The sidelines. The kids played games, and clapped and sang together. But most striking was an image of shy Rahel, having forgotten momentarily about the camera, dancing with her sister-friends in front of Shelby.
Rahel and her AHOPE sister, Ruth Tesfaye (middle left), compete in a race during field day.
The fellowship ended, and Shelby completed her assignment. Her professors were pleased. But in her field notes, Shelby was ambivalent. My work and being there for the last two-plus weeks was insignificant and maybe even selfish, she wrote.
When Shelby met Rahel before leaving through the front gate for the last time, she teared up and said, “I’ll see you later, Rahel.” But that wasn’t true.
Rahel said goodbye and waved hesitantly, with a solemn look on her face.
Then Shelby went home.
Scott Winter is an assistant professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Shelby Wolfe is a sophomore photojournalism student at the University of Nebraska, where she is a senior photographer at the Daily Nebraskan. In November her project on Rahel will be released in a seven-minute multimedia video. Twitter: @UNL_scottwinter
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The Examined Life By Stephen Grosz
W.W. Norton & Company. 240 pages.
I didn’t expect a collection of stories about the inner struggles of psychoanalysis patients to be so much like a detective novel. Yet, in The Examined Lifeparallels abound.
Clues are uncovered slowly in each chapter and a mystery unfolds. Hidden motivations are unearthed by identifying the meaningful in the mundane. The skillful narrator walks the reader through his ruminative process of making sense of the clues. A truth is revealed that appears to have been there are along.
Psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz has penchant for storytelling. He knows when to showcase his professional proficiencies and when to let the tale tell itself. The truth, after all, is somewhere in-between.
What was your motivation in embarking on this project?
I am sixty. I have a ten-year-old daughter and a seven-year-old son. My father had two heart attacks by the time he was my age, and my mother died when she was sixty-four. If I’m not here when my children are teenagers or young adults, I thought about what I want them to know.
The thirty-one stories in The Examined Life address what I think of as some of life’s biggest problems — problems we all face. More than that, I wanted to portray a way of thinking, a disposition towards oneself and the world that might be useful to them and others. Also, psychoanalysis requires time and money, and many people won’t be able to afford it. I wanted to set down some of the important things I’ve learned in a way that may be helpful to those who are unable to have psychoanalysis or therapy.
Given that you have a twenty-five-year history to draw from, why did you choose to include these particular stories?
I chose these stories because they have a kind of urgency, and I felt I had something to say about these fundamental life issues. My patients had taught me something that I wanted to get down on paper. Of course, I also write with my patients’ privacy in mind. Confidentiality plays an important role in what I choose to write about, and how I write.
In some ways, The Examined Lifedemystifies psychoanalysis, which has become a part of popular culture — and not always in an accurate or respectable way. How did this influence the way you told these stories?
Psychoanalysis has become something of a joke in our culture. In the book, I try to set all that aside and just give a simple picture of what psychoanalysis really is — and what actually happens between an analyst and patient.
The truth is, the people who come to psychoanalysis are in pain, and usually part of the pain is that they can’t articulate it well. They don’t have a way of telling their story. The author Karen Blixen said, “All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.” But what if a person can’t tell a story about their sorrows? What if the story tells them?
In my work I try to hear the story my patient cannot tell and then to help them to tell it. To me, all the highfalutin psychoanalytic language — which is not in my book — is a diversion from the directness of our speech. So, I try to tell stories I think are important as plainly and directly as possible.
Change is a recurring theme in the book. People come to you because they desire change, because they have experienced an unanticipated or undesired change. People resist change. People succeed and don’t succeed in making changes in their lives. Does hearing other people’s stories of change make it easier to do so ourselves?
“I want to change, but not if it means changing,” a patient once said to me in complete innocence. Change is difficult for many reasons. One reason people resist change is that all change requires loss. This can be hard to see, and even harder to accept. But there are many things that help us to change. I believe one of those things is hearing other people’s stories.
Some stories touch our heart. A good story can help us to think differently. Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Andrew Solomon’s Far From the Tree — these recent books made me think differently. If you are able to think in a new way, you can act in a new way. Thinking differently is the first step towards change.
After her mother's unexplained death, a young woman ponders the long-term toll of not having access to adequate health care. A toothache brings on psychic hysteria about whether her own eventual demise will align with that of her mom.
I don’t know why my mom died at the age of forty-nine because my father refused to allow an autopsy. His superstitious and deeply traditional beliefs mean I’ll never know the cause of my mother’s death. Was it a complication from having high blood pressure? Did she have a heart attack? At this point, all I can do is speculate — so I do.
A theory I’ve come up with recently is that her death may have been caused by problems with her teeth. When my mom was in her thirties, her teeth began falling out for some unknown reason. By the time she died, she had only a few left in her mouth. I wonder if the pain and swelling in her face before she died was due to an untreated tooth abscess. A recent study shows that oral infections are causing more hospitalizations, and if left untreated, a tooth abscess can be deadly when bacteria spread.
“When money and access are not problems, an abscessed tooth can easily be treated with a root canal or an extraction,” reports the New York Times. “But increasingly, Americans rely on hospital emergency rooms for dental care, instead of regular dentist visits — a trend exacerbated by a lack of insurance coverage and trouble paying out of pocket.”
I remember times when I was growing up that my family used old newspapers instead of bathroom tissue because my parents couldn’t afford toilet paper. Having narrowly escaped homelessness, my father solicitously cut the newspaper into squares, and we laughed at the extent of his effort because that somehow made it less dispiriting. Some days we had electricity, and some days we didn’t. But the presence of stressed out, overworked parents was ubiquitous.
My tale of ill-fitting, hand-me-down, thrift-store clothes and sharing a bedroom with my older brothers is not unique. Anyone who grew up poor can tell you similar stories of the challenges that come from not having what you need, materially and emotionally. They can also tell you what it’s like to make decisions about their lives without the assumption of ever achieving financial security. It never occurred to me that I could have a life that didn’t involve economic struggle, and I wonder if my decision to become a writer isn’t a result of this. Who would seek out a lifetime of poverty other than someone for whom it was a prophecy?
Being a writer means I have no health insurance, no steady paycheck, and no stability. While writers who aspire to upward mobility say they’re simply “low income,” as though the condition is temporary, my intimate familiarity with life below the line of poverty makes me uninterested in feigning comfort through euphemistic niceties. It’s not comfortable juggling deadlines for a dozen publications while not technically being employed by any one. I thought I had accepted my lot, but a few weeks ago I began having problems with my teeth.
The dull ache persisted for days. Overwhelmed by my circumstance, I immediately assumed the worst. This was the beginning of the end. In two years, I’ll be thirty, and my teeth will start falling out. Soon after, I will die penniless and alone just like my mom.
I know this line of thinking probably seems extreme. A toothache doesn’t typically bring on psychic hysteria about one’s impending death, but if my life has taught me anything, it is that every misstep can be the start of a downward spiral. One illness can be the difference between making do and ruin.
For months I’ve been putting together a referral binder for a women’s recovery center where I am a volunteer. As soon as my tooth began to ache, I poured through the dental resources, frantically calling each practice to beg for an appointment. They all said the same thing: our budget has been slashed, and we are unable to accept new patients at this time.
One clinic told me their wait-list is over a year long. Another said my only option was to show up at 6 a.m. because the only way I would be seen is if I were one of the first three people in line, although that was only for extractions. All the receptionists I spoke with were deeply apologetic, and I could hear the sadness in their voices. I assume they spend a good amount of their days turning away people in need. Despite these women’s compassion, I cracked. I reached my emotional limit and commenced to sob.
As I wept, I thought back to every crappy clinic I’d visited. I remembered the crackpot doctor who used Google to answer my routine questions. I recalled the times I’d been ripped off because I couldn’t afford another option. I thought about the number of clinic staff who’d told me that if I only had a child I didn’t want and couldn’t care for I’d be eligible for health insurance through the California Medical Assistance Program (Medi-Cal) — but even that doesn’t include coverage for dental work.
I realized I’d gotten so used to receiving poor treatment that I no longer believed I deserved better care. I wonder how many other uninsured Americans believe the same.
I wonder about the lives of people who have health insurance. I imagine the ease of having a dentist who will make an appointment for me because they fear losing my business or care about my well-being. I consider what it must be like to drive to an air-conditioned dentist’s office without having to wait for a perpetually late bus in the smoggy, summertime heat while being harassed by men on the street. I think about handing over a copayment instead of waiting for the visit’s bill, and carelessly allowing the dentist to address my toothache without fear of how much each piece of gauze will cost me.
I want to say I felt happy for the people for whom going to the dentist is not a time of stress and struggle, but my tears in that moment contained only hatred for them and the entire American medical system.
We often don’t consider the long-term toll — personally and as a country — of what it means to have a nation of people who can’t access adequate health care. In addition to our physical depreciation, new research confirms the negative neurological effects of a life plagued by financial anxiety. Having scientific data to back up my personal experience is oddly comforting yet disconcerting. Mostly, it is evidence of the injustice of poverty.
Tina with her mom.
When the poor are treated as collateral damage in a fight between wealthy, well-insured politicians, people like my mom die. It wasn’t so long ago that she and I were snuggled together on the couch, giggling at the sight of my dad cutting that newspaper into squares. And when I am able to find the humor to commiserate with others like me about the absurdity of our situations, I know my mother lives on through me. She gave me what she could when we had nothing at all.
I still haven’t been able to see a dentist about my toothache, and though I have moments when I fear my mother’s and my fates will be the same, the memories of what my mom gave me drive me to keep fighting for something better than she had — so I do.
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